Market Cap
In plain English
Price multiplied by circulating supply. It ranks coins by total value — but it is not the amount of money invested, and a low price does not mean a coin is cheap.
What market cap measures
Market capitalisation is the current price of a coin multiplied by the number of units in circulation. It is the standard way to rank cryptocurrencies by size and to compare assets whose prices are not otherwise comparable.
A coin trading at $0.01 with 100 billion units in circulation has a $1 billion market cap. A coin trading at $50,000 with 20,000 units has the same. Price alone tells you nothing about size.
Why price per coin misleads
The most common beginner mistake is assuming a low unit price means room to grow. "This coin is only $0.001, it just needs to reach $1" ignores that such a move would often require a market cap larger than the entire crypto market. Supply is the missing half of the equation.
What it does not measure
Market cap is not money invested. It values every existing coin at the latest traded price, even though most of those coins never traded at it. A small amount of buying in a thin market can add billions to a nominal market cap without anything like that sum changing hands.
It also says nothing about liquidity. Two coins with equal market caps can differ enormously in how much you can actually sell without moving the price.
Related measures
Fully diluted valuation (FDV) uses total eventual supply rather than circulating supply. A large gap between market cap and FDV signals that many tokens are still locked and will unlock later — future sell pressure worth knowing about.
Circulating supply figures vary between data providers depending on which tokens are counted as locked, so rankings can differ slightly by source.